How Jimmy Wales’ Wikipedia Harnessed the Web as a Force for Good

Photo: Christopher Morris/VII

Encyclopaedia Britannica finally threw in the towel. In March 2012, after 244 years, the staple reference source of libraries and households ceased publishing its 32 dusty volumes. (It survives in digital form.) Who humbled the mighty Britannica? Jimmy Wales and his crowdsourced compendium of all the world’s knowledge.

Wikipedia began as a side project of Wales’ dotcom-bubble-era entrepreneurship (he launched a search engine, among other things), but it soon took on a life of its own. Far surpassing its paper predecessors in sheer size and scope, it became the go-to source for answers to a vast variety of questions and the best evidence for the proposition that information really does want to be free. And though everyone who has ever added an obscure data nugget or deleted a spurious fact can claim a little of the credit, the global, free-of-charge, not-for-profit, real-time encyclopedia is very much Wales’ baby.

Founding Wikipedia in 2001 (along with Larry Sanger, by most accounts other than Wales’), Wales understood the web’s egalitarian underpinning and the open source method’s ability to spur productivity on a grand scale. What separated him from many first-wave net entrepreneurs, though, was his idealism: He harnessed those forces in the service of social good. He recognized the incalculable value of offering the entire human store of knowledge to anyone, anywhere, at no cost, and he made it his job to get it done.

Wales’ work has been criticized by observers either misinformed about the mechanics by which Wikipedia improves itself or nostalgic for a time before the illusion of a singular, authoritative perspective was irrevocably shattered. And the man himself has come under fire as having overstepped the line between do-gooder and dictator. Yet Wikipedia rolls on, delivering more than 24 million articles in 285 languages by 85,000 regular contributors to nearly 500 million readers monthly. It is one of the foundations of contemporary life. Tomorrow it will be even better.

Wired: Your mother ran a two-room schoolhouse in Huntsville, Alabama, where you began your education. How did that influence your career?

Jimmy Wales: The school was very open-ended. We had a lot of time available for reading and independent study. That impacted my later work and the way I think about things today. Also, my uncle owned a computer store, so I learned to program reasonably early on. We had a TRS-80 from RadioShack at home. We got a Commodore later on.

Wired: When did you first encounter the Internet?

Wales: I discovered the Internet proper in 1989, but my high school, which was a small private school in Alabama, got a DEC PDP-11 minicomputer in 1982. It was a networked computer environment with 20 terminals that had email and all the other elements of later Unix systems. I went to school with Brian Reynolds, who was the chief game designer of Zynga until recently, and Robert Kennedy, who’s a software engineer at Google. Someone posted on Facebook a picture of us from the 1983 yearbook: We were the “qualified computer operators.”

Wired: You worked on a PhD in finance at Indiana University but left before earning the degree. Why?

Wales: I dropped out of school to become a futures and options trader in Chicago. In the evenings, as a hobby, I was writing a web browser; I didn’t really have a life back then. When Netscape went public and it was worth more than $2 billion on the first day, it clicked in my mind that something big was happening on the Internet.

Wired: And so you started your own Internet company.

Wales: In 1996 we started a search engine and web directory called Bomis. It was sort of like Yahoo. The main difference was that users could make web rings, connecting sites that had similar topics. So the connection to my later work is that we allowed people to categorize websites on their own, under any kind of topic.

Wired:The Atlantic wrote that Bomis became known as the “Playboy of the Internet.”

Wales: That’s a completely ridiculous description. We allowed people to categorize whatever they wanted. One very popular category turned out to be image galleries of female actresses and so forth.

Wired: How did you decide to start an encyclopedia?

Wales: It was the dotcom era, so we were just making cool stuff to see what would work. Since grad school I had been watching the growth of the open source software movement, seeing programmers collaborating to build production-quality software under an economic model that people were puzzled by and skeptical of. I realized that that kind of collaboration could extend beyond software into all kinds of cultural works. I’d been in long email exchanges with a philosophy professor I had met online, and I saw that people could be very generous with their time if they found the conversation worthwhile. An encyclopedia seemed like the most straightforward kind of thing people could collaborate on, because it’s fairly well understood what an encyclopedia article is supposed to be, and it’s fairly objective, so you can settle disagreements. Additionally, I’ve always loved encyclopedias. The World Book Encyclopedia had a cherished place in our home.

Wired: Your first encyclopedia, Nupedia, was peer-reviewed. How did it lead to the free-for-all that is Wikipedia?

Wales: We had been working on Nupedia for nearly two years, but we had only completed something like a couple dozen articles. I wanted to figure out why it was taking so long. So I decided to write an entry about Robert Merton, who had recently won the Nobel Prize in economics. When I set out to do it, I realized that the editors were going to send my draft to the most prestigious finance professors they could find, and it felt very intimidating. That’s when I realized, this isn’t going to work; it has to be easier to contribute.

The Encyclopedic Mind of Jimmy Wales

The Wikipedia cofounder started out as a PhD student in economics and ended up unleashing a revolution in knowledge. —Elise Craig

1969

A visit from a traveling salesman leaves Wales with his first encyclopedia, a World Book. Educated by his mother and grandmother in a nontraditional school, he spends hours reading encyclopedias, including Britannica.

1994

Drops out of his PhD program in economics at the Indiana University and takes a job as a trader at Chicago Options Associates, a futures and options firm. For fun, he writes code after work, building a web browser.

1996

Meets Tim Schell through an online philosophy mailing list and the pair join up to found the male-oriented search engine Bomis. The site allows users to organize content and soon features photos of “Bomis babes.”

2000

Hires Larry Sanger to help him build Nupedia, an online encyclopedia with rigorous standards and written by scholars. When they shut it down in 2003, only 24 articles have made it through the peer-review process.

2001

Wikipedia goes live on January 15. Wales and others thought a wiki might help bring in more Nupedia submissions. Wikipedia takes off. In a few days it outpaces Nupedia, and by the end of February it has 150 entries.

2003

Founds the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit umbrella organization that now covers Wikipedia, an incubator, an open content textbook collection, a dictionary, a quotation search engine, a travel guide, and more.

2004

In an effort to “build the rest of the library,” Wales and Angela Beesley found Wikia, a for-profit company that maintains more than 200,000 wikis covering topics from Adele to Gears of War to iCarly.

2005

Gets caught editing his own Wikipedia bio to remove mentions of Larry Sanger as cofounder, as well as references to “soft-core pornography” on Bomis. He says he is correcting errors but also calls his actions “in poor taste.”

2006

Wikipedia gets its 5 millionth article. Today, with more than 24 million entries, it still pursues its founding mission: “to bring about a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.”

Click the arrows to move through the timeline.

Wired: When did you first hear the word wiki ?

Wales: I’m not sure, but the first time the concept became clear to me was in December 2000, when Jeremy Rosenfeld, who worked with me at the time, proposed using a wiki on the encyclopedia project. We decided to give it a try, and we got more work done in two weeks than we had done in two years.

Wired: How did you decide to make Wikipedia a nonprofit?

Wales: In June 2003, at the depth of the dotcom crash, it was growing quickly, but there wasn’t huge traffic. Since it was a community project, it made sense to me that it should be free of advertising and not for profit. So I set up the Wikimedia Foundation and donated everything to it.

Wired: You’ve said that giving away Wikipedia was either the smartest or the dumbest thing you’ve ever done.

“Obviously I could have made a lot of money. It’s the world’s sixth-most-popular website.”

Wales: That was a joke. It was the dumbest thing because it’s now the sixth-most-popular website in the world. Obviously I could have made a lot of money. But it was the smartest thing because Wikipedia is this amazing cultural institution.

Wired: At some point, you decided you weren’t really out to make money.

Wales: I’m not opposed to making money, but it wasn’t like I went through some kind of transformation either. I like to do things that intrigue me.

Wired: How did the editing process evolve?

Wales: Over time, we’d have some kind of a problem; we’d have a big discussion and figure out the most minimal, least intrusive way to solve it. In the early days, for example, I was the only person who could ban people from editing, but clearly that wouldn’t scale. So we gave more people powers to block contributors temporarily, we created an arbitration committee to deal with complex cases, and so on.

Wired: It has also been reported that you’ve taken actions seemingly contrary to Wikipedia’s principles. In 2005, you allegedly edited your own entry to reapportion credit for founding the encyclopedia. In March 2008, you were accused of sanitizing an entry in return for a donation to Wikimedia.

Wales: It’s not against the rules to edit an entry about yourself, and I fully stand by those edits. But I should respond to the second accusation. No such thing happened.

Wired: Meanwhile, Wikia is a for-profit business.

Wales: We’re building the rest of the library, everything that doesn’t belong in the encyclopedia. Our real strength is in entertainment and gaming. For instance, the Call of Duty wiki is massive and very popular. Quantcast ranks Wikia the 40th-most-trafficked website in the US. So it’s quite busy.

Wired: Unlike Google, which has censored its site in China, you have refused to censor Wikipedia.

Wales: I consider the free flow of information a human rights issue. We will never compromise with censorship in any jurisdiction anywhere in the world.

Wired: Beyond Chinese, Wikipedia has added an enormous number of languages.

Wales: I want to have at least 250,000 entries in every language that has at least 1 million native speakers. That’s about 350 languages. Only 19 have that many entries so far, so we’ve got a long way to go.

Wired: How big might Wikipedia become?

Wales: There are loads of things we can’t effectively write about, because there’s no way to verify them. You can’t write a biography about my grandmother, although she was a remarkable person, because there are no reliable sources other than a birth certificate and marriage record. So you can’t yet have an entry on everyone.

Wired: Do you see any threats to Wikipedia’s ongoing success?

Wales: There are direct threats from authoritarian governments that censor the Internet. I’m also concerned about clumsy legislation driven by special interests. The Stop Online Piracy Act was a classic example. Anyone with a serious understanding of the Internet would tell you this legislation would have had virtually no impact on piracy, but it would have introduced a layer of control that could be misused for lots of other purposes. It wasn’t that the US government was secretly trying to control the Internet; it was just badly written legislation. That’s a threat that we really need to be aware of.

Wired: What’s on the horizon for you?

Wales: In January, the Wikimedia Foundation launched Wikivoyage, a travel site. It remains to be seen how that’s going to develop, but it’s humming right along. At Wikia we’re seeing massive growth in mobile and second-screen use. People are watching Mad Men on television but simultaneously looking at the Mad Men wiki. We’re doing some interesting things to facilitate that. Beyond that, I’m absolutely certain there’s more we can collaborate on.